“Just so,” grunted the other, who was licking several burns he had received on his bare hands during the fierce little engagement just ended, though he made no complaint, seeming to think he had gotten off pretty easily, considering the serious offense of which he had been guilty, that of sleeping on his post, and which might have cost him his life in war times, had he been a soldier.
Thad noticed this fact, and quietly getting out some salve he carried for just such occasions forced Davy to let him attend to his hurts, though the other insisted that they “did not amount to much, anyway.”
“How do you think it started?” Giraffe asked, and in so doing he really voiced the thoughts of everybody.
“Huh! I reckon that’s an easy one to answer,” replied Step Hen, promptly. “Anybody c’n see at just a single look that the wind must have picked up a live coal from the fire, and carried it into a bunch of stuff to leeward. After that it was fanned, till it spread wider and wider. That was going on while Davy and me snoozed away like a pair of sillies. No use talking, boys, I’m ashamed of myself; and let me tell you, it’ll be a long time before I ever go to sleep on duty again–not if I have to keep jabbing a pin into my leg every minute or so, to make me jump.”
“Does that explanation go, Thad?” asked Bumpus, still breathing hard after his recent violent exertions.
“Well, it looks that way, for the fire was actually to leeward of the camp when I first saw it,” answered the patrol leader; but there must have been something in his manner rather than his speech that caught the attention of Giraffe.
“But you ain’t quite satisfied, are you, Thad?” he remarked, pointedly. “You just keep athinkin’ that perhaps it wasn’t an accident after all? Am I right, now?”
“Wow! what does that kind of talk stand for?” burst out Bumpus. “Are you hinting that it was all a part of a dark scheme to burn us out of camp?”
“Wait till Eli and Jim come back,” Thad went on. “You’ve noticed that they’re not with us right now. Fact is, they took the lantern, and went off about the time we were finishing our dressing. But before they went, Jim gave me to understand what they had some reason to suspect.”
“The work of big Cale Martin and his crowd? Is that what you’re aiming to tell us, Thad?” demanded Giraffe.